From Romantic History to Communications Theory: Lome Pierce as Publisher of C. W. Jefferys and Harold Innis

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As editor of Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) was inspired by a nationalism rooted in his Methodist upbringing and education. As well as his many literary endeavours, Pierce had an enormously important role as the conceptualiser and publisher of nationalistic readers and history textbooks that dominated the English-language elementary and high school market circa 1930 to 1960, textbooks illustrated by the artist C.W. Jefferys (1869-1951) to great effect. Because Pierce and Jefferys shared a sense of nationalism and romantic history, Pierce was largely responsible for giving Jefferys the outlets for his work, culminating in the three-volume Picture Gallery of Canadian History between 1942 and 1950, made Jefferys the dominant visual myth-maker of Canada’s past. Through the work of C.W. Jefferys and series like The Canada Books of Prose and Verse and The Canadian History Readers, generations of Canadian school children were influenced by Pierce’s nationalistic publishing programme. Lorne Pierce was an early publisher of the pioneering economic history of Harold Innis (1894-1952). In their work on volumes of the landmark series on the Relations of Canada and the United States, underwritten by the Carnegie Endowment, Innis and Pierce displayed a gritty, pragmatic nationalism in their dealings with their collaborators in the United States, notably James Shotwell and Bartlet Brebner. Despite their common intellectual concerns about the effect of the social sciences on Canadian religious life in the 1940s, Pierce, like many of his contemporaries, was somewhat bemused by the obscurity and difficulty of Innis’s later work on communications. As a result he read and commented on Innis’s later manuscripts but declined to publish them.